iGame Radio

I’ve downloaded the Mac Steam client and been spending the past hour perusing its dark mysteries. And I’m both happy with what I’m seeing, while perhaps slightly concerned with the performance so far.

First, the good. When the client pops up, one of the very first things you see is that Portal is available for free. That’s right, to celebrate the release of the Mac version of Steam, Valve has opened Portal up, all versions, for free through the 24th. I cannot *wait* to get my hands on this game. I have to say it’s one of the few games that my Linux-loving husband has been able to play for years before me, and I’m totally jealous.

You also immediately know which games are available for both Mac and Windows and which aren’t. In the lower, right hand corner of each game image is a small logo that shows which platform the game runs on. For Mac and Windows, it shows not just the Mac and Windows logos, but also the SteamPlay moniker, which also tells you that it is cross-platform play.

And the list of games available for the Mac is pretty big…so far 64 total games. However, you may notice that the number of casual games far outstrips the number of more traditional style games, such as FPS, racing, RPG, or strategy. This is actually not unusual for Steam. If you take a look at the genre numbers for the Windows side, you’ll find a similar percentage too. You’ll find favorite publishers, such as PopCap, TellTale Games, LucasArts, and Aspyr.

But you’ll find some unexpected gems. I didn’t expect to find City of Heroes available on Steam, to be honest. And Football Manager 2010 is out as well. Also, I had just heard literally hours before that Runic Game’s Torchlight for the Mac is now available on Steam as well (I just received a review copy as well, so will be reviewing that soon). And there’s the Professor Fizzwizzle series, the Diner Dash series, and Indie favorites such as Machinarium and Braid.

And now for the bad. The client runs kind of slow. Moving from screen to screen and moving screens up and down is slow…noticeably slow. When you are moving from tab to tab, you can’t tell if a transition has stalled or not because the screen just goes grey, and there’s no indication whether the client is still trying to get data from the server or not. Trying to browse through all of the Mac games is slow, and you can’t browse through by genre either.

Oh, and one last nag. When you try to add a friend to your friends list, if the font is black and you cut and paste, you can’t see if you have, in fact, pasted their name in. Typing names in is so last year.